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In this writer’s view, the building of social capital starts with the development of personal individual capital. The author posits that an individual may not be optimally effective in building meaningful social relationships and networks, or in influencing results in one’s community that serve the individual and others well, unless the individual has the prerequisite personal attributes and skillsets to do so. Therefore, in this chapter, the author identifies four key personal capital attributes that he sees as foundational to the building of social capital from the inside out. The dynamic synergistic interface among these four core attributes (Control, Empathy, Awareness, and Resolve), is referred to in this chapter as “Intrapower that is seen as a potent facilitative force in the effective building of social capital.

In this study, we examine the relationship between contextual variables related to teachers and student performance in Advanced Algebra classrooms in the USA. The data were gathered from a cluster-randomized study on the effects of SimCalc MathWorlds®, a curricular and technological intervention as a replacement for Algebra 2 curriculum, on student learning of Algebra 2 content. Conditional measures (teacher background characteristics) and instructional measures (self-reported instructional preferences, stances, and classroom practices) were subjected to a variety of empirical analyses to discern their relationship to student learning. Researchers examined both the overall effect of teacher contextual variables on student learning and the specific effect of SimCalc on both teacher instructional measures and student performance. There is evidence to support that teachers who use the SimCalc curriculum value classroom communication, deep understanding of math concepts, and support for both routine and non-routine problems. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014.

The paper investigates how some drivers of technology diffusion shape the volatility and irregularity of the diffusion process. It presents an agent-based simulation model of technology diffusion that includes variables to control technology generations, social pressures, market size, and network randomness. Several variable combinations are defined, technology diffusions are simulated, and the volatility and irregularity of the process are measured. The paper explores scenarios with unusually high volatility and/or irregularity in more detail. It shows that technology generations mostly affect volatility, social pressures impact irregularity, while network randomness and market size amplify the other two factors' effects. Also, the paper argues that market structure changes generated by the factor combinations in question indirectly affect diffusion volatility and irregularity and these indirect effects may explain very high levels of, and unexpected changes in the volatility and irregularity of the technology diffusion process. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc All.rights reserved.

This study investigates the relationship between bank ownership structure, non-interest income and risk in an emerging market setting. Our analysis shows that the relationship between product diversification and bank risk is significantly influenced by asset size and ownership structure. In contrast to large banks, small banks are exposed to higher risk when the income share of non-traditional banking activities rise. We also find strong evidence of differences in risk exposure of banks to non-interest income after controlling for ownership structure. Private domestic and private foreign banks experience lower risk with higher non-interest income while the converse is true for public domestic banks. Furthermore, we show that the speed with which risk adjust to non-income activities is faster for domestic private banks than for foreign banks. These results could provide useful information to investors and regulators of banking institutions as they seek to reconcile the important issues of bank ownership structure, income diversification and size on the one hand with the level of risk exposure on the other hand. © 2016, Banking and Finance Review.

This paper examines sustainability conditions when the stock effects of renewable resources prevail, and characterizes the maximal critical level of initial pollution emissions such that Pigovian tax alone ensures sustainable growth. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Understanding how experienced teachers share and articulate effective mentoring practices can guide efforts to prepare quality mentors. This qualitative study focused on mentoring practices within a teacher-designed student-teaching program conceptualized while the mentor teachers within the program were students in a graduate-level mentoring course and implemented upon the mentors’ completion of their graduate studies. Data sources included interviews and field notes from meetings with mentors and student teachers. The results detail specific mentoring practices: explicit instruction through scaffolding, developing the whole teacher, student-teacher-directed learning, fostering student teachers’ individual practice, explicit mentoring of one another, and reflecting on mentoring. These practices were enabled by program structures such as mentor meetings, an online forum, and mentors’ observation of all student teachers in the program. © 2016, © 2016 CCNY and ATE.

Although setting up a safe school is an important task for a school counselor, his or her efforts may be resisted when attempting to develop a safe school initiative in a religious community; for example, one conservative-based website gives parents explicit instructions on how to fight a school's safe schools initiatives. This article provides a review of the issues involved and a specific framework for school counselors who wish to set up a Safe Schools Initiative in the context of a resistant atmosphere, using a social justice framework. © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Asthma is a common, chronic respiratory disease that can be costly to both society and the individual. In addition to increased absenteeism, children with asthma may also be at a greater risk for developing comorbid anxiety and depression. Various complementary psychological treatments have been effective at reducing both asthmatic symptoms and psychological distress. Although the research in the area of mind-body treatments as it pertains specifically to persons with asthma is still developing, this article will describe several promising alternative treatment methods, many of which have already been, or could be easily be applied for use in a school setting. © 2016, © 2016 International School Psychology Association.

Practitioners working with children diagnosed with cancer in the school environment must consider several facets in order to effectively work with the child and family. The remission rate for children with cancer is relatively high, so one must consider whether the child is anticipating treatment, actively in treatment, or posttreatment when one thinks about the potential stressors and cognitive impacts of cancer on the child's education. This article focuses on facts associated with childhood cancer that are relevant to school-based practitioners, common stressors for children and adolescents with a personal cancer diagnosis in their lives, research-based interventions, and accommodations and modifications to consider. © 2016, © 2016 International School Psychology Association.

We defined a set of quantifiable features for authorship categorization. We performed our experiments on public domain literature - all books analyzed were obtained in plain text format through Project Gutenberg's online repository of classic books. We tested three machine learning algorithms: Artificial Neural Network, Naïve Bayes Classifier, and Support Vector Machine with our features. We found that certain features, such as punctuation and various suffixes result in a higher accuracy. In addition, the Support Vector Machine classifier produces repeatedly higher accuracies than other classifiers and seems to be a far superior method of classification in terms of authorship categorization. © 2016 IEEE.

We give the theoretical foundation for finding a reject region which gives the minimum equal error rate in serial fusion based biometric verification. Given a user-specified tolerance of x percent genuine score reject rate, we prove that there exists a unique reject region inside which the false alarm rate and impostor pass rate curves overlap, and this reject region gives the minimum equal error rate. Our theory leads to new algorithms for finding reject regions, which have two key advantages over the state-of-the-art: (1) the algorithms allow the system administrator to control the proportion of genuine scores that a reject region can erroneously reject and (2) the algorithms determine reject regions directly from the scores, without the need to estimate score distributions. Our proofs do not rely on data belonging to any particular distribution, which makes them applicable to a wide range of biometric modalities including face, finger, iris, speech, gait, and keystrokes. © 2016 IEEE.

Smartphones, while providing users ease of access to sensitive information on the go, also present severe security risks if an attacker is able to gain access to them. To strengthen the user authentication and identification in a smartphone, we develop a biometric authentication and identification system which uses the capacitive touchscreen that is featured in all current smartphones. Our methodology focuses on using the touchscreen as a sensor to capture the image of a user's ear, thumb or four fingers. We extract the capacitive raw data from the touched body part to obtain a capacitive image, and then use it to capture geometric features (e.g., length and width of a finger) and principal components. After that, we experiment with Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classifiers to verify and also identify each user. We achieved the maximum authentication accuracy of 98.84% by four fingers with SVM, and maxinum identification accuracy of 97.61% by four fingers with RF. © 2016 IEEE.

Aphasia is a general language disorder resulting from brain damage, and alexia and agraphia are specific impairments in reading and writing, respectively. This article describes the symptoms associated with each disorder, the subtypes of each impairment, and the common causes. Assessment and management approaches consistent with the World Health Organization International Classification of Functioning (WHO-ICF) are briefly reviewed. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.